A Swarm of Wasps, if Not Investors

Sunday

Feb 20, 2011 at 5:11 AM

Research shows that wasps can be taught to sniff out most anything, even bedbugs. Two scientists want to turn the idea into a product but face challenges in raising capital.

THE white paper by the Georgia scientists Glen C. Rains and W. Joe Lewis has a technical-sounding title that masks the exciting news within. “A Project to Bring Innovative New Technology Into the Market Place for Detecting Agents of Harm in Agriculture, Security, and Human Health/Safety Arenas,” it says blandly.

Luckily, Prototype is here to translate: Move over, bloodhounds, there’s a new odor detector in town.

The Wasp Hound, designed by the two scientists, is a hand-held device containing five parasitic wasps. These flying, stinger-less insects have outperformed dogs in tests that measure scent detection of cadavers, but research shows that they can be taught to sniff out anything: explosives, drugs and even that newly resurgent scourge: bedbugs.

Yes, wasps can be taught to react to the whiff of bedbugs’ pheromones. All that Mr. Rains and Mr. Lewis say they need to get their company, SmartHound Technologies, on the road to addressing the nation’s outbreak of bloodsucking pests — among many other problems — is $200,000. But so far, raising capital for research and development has been a challenge.

“If you suddenly discover a new chemical, there’s all kinds of chemical companies,” Mr. Lewis says. “All you have to do is plug it in to an existing infrastructure.” But when it comes to training bugs to swarm, no infrastructure exists. “So we’ve got this new tool with this big gap that we need to cross,” he adds. “At this point, that’s where we’re at: How can we get across that divide and take it to the marketplace?”

The Wasp Hound provides a window into the difficult process of turning scientific research — especially groundbreaking research — into a marketable product. Mr. Rains, 45, an associate professor at the University of Georgia, and Mr. Lewis, 68, a retired research entomologist who worked for nearly 40 years for the Agricultural Research Service of the United States Department of Agriculture, have jointly patented the Wasp Hound with their respective institutions. They have teamed with the Georgia Centers of Innovation, a state economic development program, to begin attracting investors. But they know they face an uphill battle.

“The term ‘wasp’ elicits a certain fear, though ours don’t sting people and are friendly,” Mr. Lewis says. Then there’s this problem: “We don’t know how to work with people who are venture capitalists. That’s not our thing; we’re scientists. I guess you’d say we’ve floundered a little bit.”

The genesis of the Wasp Hound goes back to 1988, when Mr. Lewis and a colleague, J. H. Tumlinson, published a paper in the scientific journal Nature that demonstrated how the associative learning process used by insects rivals that of higher organisms. These findings, which spawned more published papers — and which Mr. Lewis says were so radical that “had we suggested them 25 years earlier, we would have been laughed out of our profession” — led to the idea that wasps, like dogs, could potentially be used to detect targets.

First, Mr. Lewis and his colleagues had to answer an important question. While their research showed that wasps were undeniably learning and responding to chemicals and stimuli within their natural context, it was less clear whether they could learn to track things not found in their habitats: incendiary devices, say, or the chemicals typically used in arson. The answer: “We found they could detect almost anything.”

Then it became an engineering problem: how to design a tool that harnessed this insect’s skills in a way that people could easily use? That’s where Mr. Rains came in. “We devised a way of detecting the change in behavior of the wasps that would tell us when they detected an odor,” he says. “Pavlov’s dog, when you rang the bell, would always salivate. Well, wasps don’t salivate, but we found some specific behaviors they did do.”

When wasps have been trained to associate a particular odor with a reward — a good, long drink of sugar water — they get excited when they smell it. “They really move around,” Mr. Lewis says. “Like pigs to a trough.” But unlike pigs, these adult wasps live only about three weeks.

Building the Wasp Hound was a process of trial and error. The first device designed by Mr. Rains required the wasps to head toward the odor source by crawling through an opening equipped with an infrared signal that, when interrupted, would alert researchers that the odor was present. But the system didn’t provide immediate results necessary to track an odor to its exact location. “You could tell well before the wasps actually went in the hole that they’d discovered the odor,” Mr. Rains says.

That prototype was scrapped, and another was designed. This one was equipped with a fan that pulls air into it. If being used in a hotel room, say, it would be aimed at the headboard of the bed, a common spot for bedbugs. A cartridge that contains five wasps is popped into the device. A camera tracks the wasps’ movements, and those images are fed into a software program that measures food-searching behavior — what nonscientists would call swarming. “It tells us, usually within about 20 seconds, if they’ve detected the odor,” Mr. Rains said.

MR. LEWIS says he believes the Wasp Hound could be the first of a series of products that put to use what “nature invented first.” With Mr. Tumlinson and another colleague, T. C .J. Turlings, he published an article in the journal Science in 1990, for example, that showed that when a plant is stressed — a corn seedling, say, being eaten by beet army worms — it actually sends distress signals, emitting odors that attract the natural enemies of the pests. He says he can envision using certain plants as “sentinels” for particular chemicals.

“There’s all kinds of ways that harvesting natural systems could create tools,” he says “We’re just at the tip of the iceberg of potential. An association of industries could develop around it once we make this happen.”

But first, they need the Wasp Hound to pave the way by showing there’s a market. While they hope to eventually use the product for all kinds of detection — from forensics to food safety — they are counting on the furor surrounding bedbugs to encourage people to give their wasps a chance. A market price for the product has not yet been determined.

The short life span of the wasps may be a drawback, but the insects can be produced “in large numbers at pennies per thousand,” Mr. Lewis said. In other words, dogs may be man’s best friend, but wasps are cheaper.

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